Secrets to Smoother

SRSing, Part 1: The SRS Is

a Servant, Not a Master
August 24, 2008
By khatzumoto
This is part 1 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.
Word! Alliteration, son! It’s in the air and the power is
yours!
…That was awkward.
So, anyway, a lot of people have been going insane in the
membrane with SRS stress. Some have even gone on to
write weird introductions to blog posts (go figure,
eh?)…And some people (including me) even get tense when
they study.
I know what you’re thinking: “Khatzumoto gets tense?!
Dag, yo, I thought that only happened to pretty white kids
with problems“. Me, too man. Me, too.
So, yeah, I had this tension, and I know other people have it
as well. Thus, I wrote up some tips for you to help SRSing
go more smoothly and happilyly. Checkerachyo!!
The SRS is a servant not a master. That‟s right; SRS were
developed to serve you. To help you. To free you from the
burden of relearning forgotten things, and scheduling your
own reviews.
Unfortunately, however, most of us have been to school,
which means we‟re used to being slaves. That‟s right, I said
it: school is a form of slavery — a very lite form, low in
calories and sodium — but a form nonetheless. People tell
you what to wear, what to read, where to be, when to talk,
what to talk about, what words to use, when to shut up,
when to eat, when to stand, when to sit down, when to
move, when to sit still, when to pee, when to pooh, and can
enforce their will through physical violence, emotional
battery and even legal measures: it‟s slavery…or at the
very least prison. “Slavery” might be a bit hyperbolic, but
it‟s not far off the mark (?).
Anyway! The thing about slavery is that, like the elephant
in this oft-repeated anecdote, the real enslaving is not
physical but mental. You can unlock someone‟s handcuffs
but if her mind is still in chains you might as well not
bother…type thing. You can take a man out of the ghetto
but you can‟t take the trackers out of a BitTorrent file yada
yada. The same thing happens with a lot of prison inmates:
these men, and they are often men, would do anything to
bust out of that prison while they were in it, but once they
get out, they‟re so unused to their freedom that many
consciously or unconsciously choose to return to jail — I
don‟t know whether this is actually true or not, but it was in
Shawshank Redemption, so it‟s gotta be true. Wow, I love
blogging…no one to dock you points for not quoting
proper sources.
Mmm, and so, many AJATTeers put themselves in the
position of slave to their SRS. They try to turn AJATT into
school all over again. And it‟s not just their fault, nor even
school‟s fault, nor is it the fault of “society”. No, kids, the
culprit here is Khatzumoto. I‟m the one who started AJATT
off in the direction of 10,000 sentences, so much so that
some sites even call this the “10,000 sentences method“[1].
Having said that, there are at least two good (?) reasons
why I did it:
(i) Sentences, even 10,000 of them, are a clear, concise,
quantifiable thing to aim for. It‟s something you can sort of
“see”; it‟s a tangible goal; it‟s all nice and pre-reified; the
SRS even records stats and crap for you. In short, it‟s
almost everything that our current education system sets up
as valuable.
(ii) Before writing AJATT, I had shared the methods I was
using for learning Japanese; whenever someone was
interested I would just tell them what I was doing, or
maybe shoot them a quick email. One thing I noticed was
that people seemed very reticent about adopting the SRS. I
felt then and continue to feel now that the SRS was key, in
terms of allowing me to acquire and sustain literacy in
Japanese in such a relatively short time with so relatively
little effort. So, I purposely went in strong on SRS
promotion.
And the people loved it. And they went collecting
sentences like their lives depended on it. At the time, this
didn‟t bother me at all. There were hints that something bad
was going on, but at the time it just seemed like healthy
enthusiasm. I didn‟t even begin to realize a tragedy was
underway until I was myself suffering emotionally in my
Chinese Project — despite apparently using the same
methods as I had in Japanese — methods that had given me
so much success and joy. [The truth is that I was trying to
ram Mandarin Chinese into my brain through massive,
deliberate, dry, joyless sentence collection; I just bought
books full of Japanese-Chinese sentences and tried to cram
then in. While this is probably physically possible, it is also
more boring than Baroque music...yeah, I said it: Baroque
music is boring and your mother was a woman! Wanna
fight, stitch?]. What really brought the situation front and
center to my attention, though, was the extensive, lucid and
inspiring writing about this that‟s been going on at the blog
of Feed Me Japanese (especially this article). That site is
the reason I‟m writing this today, and in a sense I am re-
appropriating Khalid‟s message, which is Swahili for
“stealing his ideas in broad daylight but it‟s all good coz
the words are different”…hehe. Khalid really hits the metal
object on the head with this one:
“The implication for people who are searching for these
sentence collections is that there is an „ideal‟ set of
sentences and if you drill those in your head, you‟ll know
Japanese. [...] But, unless I‟m missing something,
Khatzumoto didn‟t have sentence collections, he collected
sentences from everything he saw and read in Japanese[2].
10,000 sentences was a natural product of what he did, not
the purpose.”
OK, so one root cause of the sentence-collection-binging
phenomenon was my own initial focus on sentences[3].
Nevertheless, there is still a clue as to what AJATT is truly
all about, and it lies in the title of the site: “all Japanese all
the time”. At its core, this method was and is about a
mental change of identity and a physical change of
lifestyle. Everything else was merely to aid that and
perhaps increase efficiency without killing fun.
You probably think I‟m insane anyway so this shouldn‟t
weird you out too much — I very frequently imagined
myself as a Japanese-raised child. Not “haha, it‟s like being
a Japanese child”. No, I pretended to BE Japanese.
Metaphor, not simile. BUT, this wasn‟t about wanting to
find a new identity for myself — a place to “belong”, nyah
nyah nyah nyah touchy-feely California stuff — too many
people confuse it for that; they worry that are or they will
somehow “lose themselves”[4]. No. There was a very real,
very hardcore, very un-touchy, un-feely reason for all this
role-playing. It is something we all know intuitively but
which only relatively recently came to me in the form of
words. And the cheat code to R.L. iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis:
Adults act according to their identity rather than their
ability.
In the vernacular — people achieve what they think they
can achieve rather than what they are actually capable of
achieving. Now, a Japanese child is expected to achieve
fluency in written and spoken Japanese as a matter of
course, no matter how much she may currently suck at it. It
is for this reason that I chose the identity of a Japanese
child when learning Japanese hardcore. Japanese language
skill is expected of Japanese people the way boyish humor
is expected of Adam Sandler. I merely availed myself of a
hearty piece of this Pygmalion Effect-type phenomenon. I
turned myself and my life into a self-fulfilling prophecy of
Japanese fluency.
Which is all well and good, but imagine if that had been
front-and-center when AJATT was first launched. I don‟t
think it would have worked; it‟s just a little too ethereal, I
think. Too…esoteric? Too abstract? Or maybe I‟m not
giving myself and other people enough credit. I
dunno…concrete methods just seem more comforting,
more obvious, more ripe for action. But, this idea of “don‟t
learn Japanese — become Japanese — be Japanese[5]“;
this is central to the method/methods discussed on this site.
The target language is no longer something you do, it is
something you are; it‟s practically the air you breathe.
There is no spoon. I‟m sure there are more
efficient/effective ways out there, but I haven‟t really seen
them yet.
Anyway, don‟t be taken in by any hints you may get (even
from me) about discipline and consistency and commitment
and all those other lame-a$$ abstract nouns[6]. When you
get down to it, this method is all about having fun and just
being…just chilling. I didn‟t “work hard”; I didn‟t really
“sacrifice” to learn Japanese; I made a lifestyle choice and
let the consequences of that choice run their natural course,
because Japanese fluency is an inevitable result of a real
and sustained Japanese environment; once you get your
ducks in a row most of it is simply coasting. Dude, most of
the time all I did was listen to Rip Slyme, shop on
Amazon.jp and download stuff online; you‟re not supposed
to spend 24 hours a day attached to your SRS deck like
unto an umbilical chord. No…What, do you want to be
bored to tears? Do you think you‟re supposed to be bored
to tears? Well let me lay it down here once and for all:
If it is not fun, then it is not of AJATT.
I know. I know it‟s hard to let go of work and pain and
struggling. But you need to let go. For your own good —
for the good of your Japanese — you must let go. I want
you to go out and get an addiction. Get several. Get
addicted to an artist or show or video game or chat site or
book series or movie in Japanese/whatever your target
language is. Momoko‟s Japanese really started booming
when she got hooked on Trick and Gintama. She does them
aaaaalll the time; she‟s got the anime of the drama of the
manga of the website of the book; the jokes she tells are
Trick jokes; the food she eats is stuff she‟s seen the
characters on Trick eat; and the other day she even had the
temerity to tell me to go dye my hair silver since: “you
already have a natural perm”. Hmm…
Back in the day, I, too, was “hooked” on all sorts of things
— Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Neon Genesis Evangelion,
Dragon Ash, Rip Slyme — all in Japanese of course. Go
get hooked. So hooked that your enjoyment of what you do
understand (however little that may be) eclipses all your
anxiety about “ohhh, this is so hard”, “ohhhh, but there‟s so
much I don‟t know yet”, “ohhh, will I ever get done?”,
“ohhhh, but I‟m too old and not Asian enough!”, “and so
on and so forth!”.

You‟re Japanese, remember? Act like it, この(mother)野郎

(lover)！
Of course continue to use your SRS. I mean, duh, who
wants to forget stuff, right? Just be sure to use it rather than
be used by it. Rule of thumb: it‟s like watching TV —
when it gets bahrin‟, yah change th‟ channel.
Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next
installment: part 2!

[1] I don‟t have a problem with that as such…collecting

sentences is a major “active activity” of the process, but the
major “passive-activity” (and the primary activity in terms
of total time) is not sentence collection but merely being in
and enjoying a location-independent immersion
environment — i.e. making a little Japan/whatever,
wherever you are. One simply can‟t be in sentence-
collecting mode 24/7 or even 18/7 or even 12/7: 1/7 or 2/7
(3+/7 on a really, really good day and) is probably tops in
terms of many people‟s ability to concentrate and give
active attention to something, at least it is for me.
[2] Yeah! Of course, as long as I felt like it…:)
[3] A more fundamental root cause may lie in the fact that I
don‟t actually know why AJATT works. Not really. Like I
kind of have these ideas — a bit of Krashen here, a bit of
AntiMoon there, my own childhood experiences of both
loss and acquisition of language, intense casual observation
of other people‟s children before the parents get weirded
out — but it‟s all very vague, and I‟m not going to sit here
and pretend to you that I know it all and have it all figured
out. And then again, I don‟t really care thaaat much why it
all works, like, it‟d be cool to know, but mostly I just care
how I can best go about doing this. I figure my peepz
Pinker, Krashen and Chomsky can go work out the whys
for me while I sit here eating peanuts and watching
Evangelion…gotta get my geli on, you know.
Yeah…so…not knowing why…
[4] Which is goofy! You are not who you are just because
of the nationality and location of the uterus you grew in,
nor because of the media you watch and listen to. You‟re
you, and if all those things were to disappear tomorrow,
you would still be you. Put another way — what‟s to stop
being a native-level user of Japanese from being just as
much a part of your identity as your liking Green Day [it's
always kids you who like Green Day that have this identity
fetish]? The fact that you were over the age of 12 when you
started it? Come on, man…
[5] And if someone comes and accuses you of being
Blasian or Wasian or Asian-but-too-Asian, tell him his
mother‟s a woman!
[6] You know, for a while, this site used to bug me. What I
mean is, it felt like it was two sites in one. One site was
happy and friendly, and the other site was violently macho
and in-your-face and people would be all “This is
madness!”, and then I‟d be all: “This is
AJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATT!”). I had
trouble reconciling these two sides. Fortunately, I have
realized the magic glue. And it is this: fun. I guess I knew
it all along, but at the same time, I didn‟t know.
Have fun. In Japanese. If you‟re having fun, the dedication
will take care of itself. Notice when you‟re bored and act
quickly to get back to fun.